Blogging and Personal Branding
(The content was written in 2018. Now, I am using Github Pages as the platform. The details about setting up a github blog is here: https://hsujoann.github.io/2022/08/09/move-my-blog-from-paid-server-to-github.html)
As I am learning Cosmos DB and writing blog posts about it at the same time, future topics flood in for my future blogs, like “Data Bricks in 7 days”, “Maximize free 7 day training trial by Pragmatic Works”, “Learning Machine Learning in 7 days”, “R and Power BI Series” and so on. While my ideas are going more quickly than my time can let me work on, I want to encourage you to start establish your personal brand by blogging. I find that blogging is more rewarding than I expected.
Why Blog?
About blogging, these videos describe its benefits to a data professional in great details and I was encouraged by it.
http://www.pass.org/24hours/2016/summitpreview/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=53732
How to start?
I use godaddy.com. But, I have see a lot of wix.com commercials on Youtube. It works too. They are very similar in my opinion. It cost some money, less than $50 per year. It take a little time to get familiar with the WordPress interface. That is it.
What to write about?
That is a question that bothers me for at least 6 month. One day, the answer came to me.
I have a friend who has background in statistics. I invited her to our Greenville SQL User Group monthly meeting. She was fascinated about the group and the setting, but she had not knowledge about SQL Server and could not catch up the speakers. I wanted to help her to learn from the beginning.
Right there, I got the idea of what to write in my blog—-to share all the good learning resources to learn SQL Server.
What to do when ideas/topics run out?
Once you start, you won’t worry about this problem anymore because ideas will never run out. Instead, new ideas flood in. All you need to do is to screen your ideas and only write those that highly interesting to you.
Conversations with other people bring in ideas. As I share my desires to find a job to people I meet, I find out how difficult for a person to find a job after long career gap. Some are external difficulties. Some are internal. One woman said,”you are brave. I even don’t know what I can do.” One man said, “You are brave. My sister is afraid of finding a job after her career gap. Now, she volunteers in libraries.” These conversations make me even braver or bolder. I have to break the boundary exerted by career gap, not only for me, but also for my fellow stay-at-home moms. So, I started to share this series about mindset of growth and change.
The meetings you go to bring in ideas too. There are endless.
In summary
My experience with blogging is very rewarding. I might never write a popular blog. But, blog writing make my learning more exciting. In this sense, I am helping myself. If my blogs ever help one reader, that is good enough for me.